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Edwin Muir

I lived from 1887-1959. I was from Scotland, and am in the English category.

Edwin Muir was born on the Orkney island of Wyre in 1887. He spent his early years on of his father's farm, 'The Bu'. A stent with poverty forced the family to move to Glasgow in 1901. The move from the peaceful setting of Orkney to industrialised Glasgow was extremely traumatic for Muir. He later described it as a descent from the innocence of a rural Eden into Hell. Because of hardships, within a few years of their arrival, two of his brothers and both his parents were dead. The remaining siblings chose to go their separate ways and Muir found himself adrift in a large city with little education or prospects. In 1916 he began contributing poetry to a magazine called New Age under the pseudonym 'Edward Moore', and his first book, a volume of short pithy essays on society, politics and the arts, entitled We Moderns, was published in 1918. Today, he is identified as one of the central figures of the modern Scottish literary Renaissance, both for his poetry and for his book Scott and Scotland (1936)

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  • The Animals
    They do not live in the world,
    Are not in time and space.
    22 lines
  • The Horses
    Barely a twelvemonth after
    The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
    53 lines
  • The Combat
    It was not meant for human eyes,
    That combat on the shabby patch
    50 lines
  • Merlin
    O Merlin in your crystal cave
    Deep in the diamond of the day,
    14 lines
  • Scotland's Winter
    Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill,
    The sun looks from the hill
    28 lines
  • Robert the Bruce (To Douglas in Dying)
    'MY life is done, yet all remains,
    The breath has gone, the image not,
    32 lines
  • In Love For Long
    I've been in love for long
    With what I cannot tell
    37 lines, 1 comment
  • Scotland 1941
    We were a tribe, a family, a people.
    Wallace and Bruce guard now a painted field,
    41 lines
  • Abraham
    The rivulet-loving wanderer Abraham
    Through waterless wastes tracing his fields of pasture
    16 lines
  • The Fathers
    Our fathers all were poor,
    Poorer our fathers' fathers;
    35 lines
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